A robot teammate on your Mac desktop

A small robot floats above your windows, blinks and reacts. Click it and type, or hold ⌥Space and just speak. It answers with its face, a speech bubble and its voice, using the language model you choose.

View on GitHub Install

Byte answering "what is BFS algorithm", recorded on a Mac (silent clip).

What it does

Lives on your desktop

A floating character on every Space. Drag it anywhere, close it with ×, ⌘W or Esc, and bring it back from the menu bar.

Type or talk

Click to type, or hold ⌥Space to speak. It answers out loud, and its mouth moves with its voice.

Your model, your servers

Any OpenAI-compatible chat, speech and transcription servers: Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM, Kokoro, Whisper, or a router in front of them.

Teammates

Byte

Explains computer science: algorithms, data structures, complexity, one idea at a time with a small example. Teaches an eight-lesson course with spoken quizzes and a review schedule, and remembers how you did. Green face, antenna.

Tempo

Loves music: songs, styles, rhythm and what a song is about. Pink face, headphones.

Make your own with one small file: a name, colours, antenna or headphones, a voice, and what it's for. The same file works in humanoid-companion, a simulated humanoid that walks and talks.

# ~/.config/humanoid-companion/teammates/nova.toml
name = "Nova"
tagline = "tells stories about space"
based_on = "byte"
voice = "af_sky"
role = "Your role: you tell short, true stories about space."

[colours]
glow = "#9fd0ff"
trim = "#2a3552"

Install

macOS 14 or later, with Xcode or the Swift 6 command-line tools.

git clone https://github.com/YauhenBichel/humanoid-desktop && cd humanoid-desktop
scripts/build-app.sh --install
open ~/Applications/HumanoidDesktop.app

Then choose Open Settings File… from the menu bar item and point it at your servers:

[user]
name = "Alex"
language = "de"                          # optional: the teammate answers in German

[llm]
base_url = "http://127.0.0.1:11434/v1"   # Ollama
model = "llama3.1:8b"

[voice]
tts_base_url = "http://127.0.0.1:8880/v1"   # Kokoro
stt_base_url = "http://127.0.0.1:8000/v1"   # Whisper (Speaches)

Languages and platforms

Set language and the teammate answers in it, with a voice per language if you give one. Stop words work in English and the answer language. The app's menus come from one strings file per language.

Part	macOS	Linux	Windows
TeammateKit: settings, teammates, conversation, languages, clients	tested in CI	tested in CI	planned (#11)
The desktop app	yes	planned (#12)

More language models and systems are on the roadmap: native Anthropic and Gemini support, Apple's on-device model, streaming replies, a settings window and signed releases.